Our galaxy is now known to be full of planets of all sizes, including small rocky worlds a little like our own. It’s no longer unreasonable to say that the chance of life emerging elsewhere in the galaxy is pretty good.
However there’s no reason for that alien life to resemble our own human civilization. Our own intelligence is just a good survival trick that helped us to colonize a particular niche. Most of the Earth’s other inhabitants manage just fine without smarts, or, in a few cases (dolphins, octopi, social insects and certain plants) they seem to use them in a different way.
In my opinion many aliens in science fiction appear too human, in both appearance and motivation. Sometimes this is to the good – after all, a lot of sci-fi is metaphor or allegory, but sometimes, frankly, it’s just lazy. Cat-like aliens are another issue – I’ve blogged about them in the past and will do so again. However it’s always good to see, or read about the exceptions: this post is dedicated to my favourite aliens who are truly alien.
[Tripod: Jeff Wayne's The War Of The Worlds stage show. Photo: Sci-Fi Gene]
H.G. Wells’ Martians: the blog hoppers amongst you will be pleased to discover that my favourite aliens are indeed Martian. In his classic novel of alien invasion, Wells imagined an ancient species shaped by the environment of Mars and by their own evolutionary history: mentally supercharged but physically frail after tens of thousands of years of dependence on their machines.
Runners up:
Alastair Reynolds’ Shrouders and Pattern Jugglers, the aliens of Revelation Space. Shrouders are inscrutable hermits, hidden behind deadly shields, while the Jugglers hide in plain sight: an intelligent sea capable of communication, exchange and barter but still unpredictable and equally mysterious.
The Borg: most of Star Trek’s aliens are just people with prosthetic skin features or pointy ears and mullets. When the Borg first appeared, for a while they were something genuinely different – even though Borg units still have a humanoid shape (fair enough, they are the absorbed bodies of other Star Trek species) the Borg collective intelligence was an unstoppable force unlike anything on Earth. Sadly later episodes featuring the Borg Queen or liberated units such as Seven of Nine gave the species back too much humanity.
The Xeelee: Stephen Baxter’s aliens are master engineers, working on galaxy-wide projects with purposes utterly beyond human imagination – so our predictable response, since we can’t understand them, is to throw stuff at them.
Finally the Alien itself, the xenomorph which has no humanity, just a hunger to seek out prey and complete its lifecycle. Its appearance, while designed to play on basic human fears, is perfectly unearthly.
I concede that it’s hard to write or portray something truly alien, just as it’s hard for a writer to come up with any character that is not, somehow, a facet of their own personality. But it’s not impossible – and it’s worth going that extra light-year to make your alien species a little more credible.
We are not alone! This post is part of the My Favourite Martian bloghop, hosted by http://www.thegeektwins.com, http://justadashofgeek.com, http://lkhill.blogspot.com and www.comicbookandmoviereviews.com. You can find out about the bloghop and other participants here.
"On the fourteenth day I went into the kitchen, and I was surprised to find that the fronds of the red weed had grown right across the hole in the wall, turning the half-light of the place into a crimson-coloured obscurity.
"Slowly I thrust myself out through the red weed, and stood upon the mound of rubble.
"I stood on a mound of smashed brickwork, clay, and gravel, over which spread a multitude of red cactus-shaped plants, knee-high, without a solitary terrestrial growth to dispute their footing. The trees near me were dead and brown, but further a network of red thread scaled the still living stems.
"The neighbouring houses had all been wrecked, but none had been burned; their walls stood, sometimes to the second story, with smashed windows and shattered doors. The red weed grew tumultuously in their roofless rooms. 
"(I) went on my way through scarlet and crimson trees towards Kew - it was like walking through an avenue of gigantic blood drops...
"Directly this extraordinary growth encountered water it straightway became gigantic and of unparalleled fecundity. Its seeds were simply poured down into the water of the Wey and Thames, and its swiftly growing and Titanic water fronds speedily choked both those rivers.
"At Putney, as I afterwards saw, the bridge was almost lost in a tangle of this weed, and at Richmond, too, the Thames water poured in a broad and shallow stream across the meadows of Hampton and Twickenham. As the water spread the weed followed them, until the ruined villas of the Thames valley were for a time lost in this red swamp...
"The red creeper swarmed up the trees about the old palace, and their branches stretched gaunt and dead, and set with shrivelled leaves, from amid its clusters." - H.G. Wells
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